Last week I was fortunate enough to catch up with some very good friends back in Sydney. This is a really smart bunch – we’ve known each other since university. The conversation was fantastic, ranging over many topics. At some point I realised a collection of links to some of these might be useful.

This morning I had a sudden urge to find out about adding a third (or fourth) external monitor to my MacBook Pro. I’ve been a multiple monitor user off and on since the early 1990’s – I do find the extra screen real estate very useful.

I’ll assume you can add a second monitor – that just requires the appropriate dongle (cable) from Apple for your model.

All of this will be dramatically simpler once more Thunderbolt devices are around – the latest Macs now hav this super high speed port to connect multiple monitors, external drives and so on. For the rest of us slumming it with slightly older gear :

Here’s a few notes on what’s happening with multiple monitor setups these days:

There’s an app for that! Air Display is a ten buck app that turns your iPad, iPhone & even iPod touch into an external monitor for your Mac (and Windows too.) Requires both to be on the same wifi network. How good will this look on the new iPad? Cost? about $10

Now I just need a spare monitor or two and a long weekend to try some of these out!

Note: some of these links are affiliate links and could result in me being paid.

Thinking out loud here. A favourite boardgame in our family is “Stockmarket” – a classic from the 1960’s that is fun all (yadda yadda.) We have a game underway at the moment (well, on hold since last night anyway 😉

Here’s my train of thought:

Wouldn’t it be great to have an iPhone app to keep track of your cash, stocks and give you a running total net wealth as you play? Of course it would.

Then the marketing brain comes on : but the market would likely be too small to justify the development. But if you made a web app, it could be usable no matter the client and upgrades for new games would be instant!

Then geek brain comes back in : how would you sync a web app’s users (i.e. people sitting at a table playing a board game) easily? Without a registation process?

To restate the problem: I’m wondering how to associate players in web browsers to the same game.

What is you were to create an alpha-numeric key out of the players first initials and their ages (or the hour the game started)? This would create a (most likely) low-collision key (along with the game chosen) so the web app could link the various users together in tracking the actual game that they have on the table in front of them.

That’s pretty much it. Imagine a key for the game stockmarket : m37m33j14a11 for example. Plenty of room there for multiple games running at once without many collisions on a lookup table, wouldn’t you say?

We are told often enough, usually by our mothers, that variety is the spice of life. It is also true online – without variety in your sources, all you have are people who agree with you. Fun for a while perhaps, but ultimately lacking in stimulation.

This struck me particulary when this morning I saw the following two tweets in my tweet-stream:

Went into the LEGO store and Nintendo World and it was like being a kid again! Couldn't stop grinning 😀

“When the film of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released on 4 November 2001, I was 11 and in my final year of primary school … Nine years later, I find myself again nervously glancing at my watch on Friday night as I make my way towards the Leicester Square Odeon in London”

It isn’t even ten years. Not a whole decade.

Try this :

1977 : I am in the middle of primary school, in the fourth class. We take a class (school?) excursion into the city of Sydney, to the Hoyts Entertainment Centre (majority owned at the time by 20th Century Fox) which had opened only one year earlier. This is truly one of the formative experiences of my childhood – we saw the movie “Star Wars” on the big screen. Really big. Really loud. I was nine years old.

For many years afterwards my dreams were haunted by, as I discovered in my twenties, this image of the exterior of Hoyts from across the road. Really. I dreamt that picture, in colour, at night, lights blazing and the names of movies up on the boards out front for all to see. Is it any wonder I held a soft spot for another movie that I saw there over four hundred times through the nineties? But I digress …

All this was the setting for the mind blowing experience that was Star Wars.

Fast forward now to 2005. The release of the final installment in the Star Wars saga. The mouth of the snake chewing on its own tail that is Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. That, people, is a wait of [sound of gears grinding in brain…] TWENTY EIGHT YEARS.

So take your Generation Y (or whoever-the-marketing-department-thinks-you-are) whining about waiting nine whole years for a cycle to end and suck on it. I waited three times longer and was so completely devasted by the experience of it all coming to an end that, frankly, I’m not sure I have recovered from. Perhaps I shouldn’t have seen it. I certainly came home, lay on the couch and was, in all seriousness, depressed for some time that it had really ended.

For so much of my life there had been the promise of three more episodes. An ending and a beginning all tied up neatly. When it was done, so was I.

Take this as a warning. Prepare yourselves, come the ides of 2011 don’t come crawling back here saying that I didn’t warn you.